THE MAGAZINE OF QUEENS COLLEGEqc.cuny.edu/communications/qmag/documents/qmag_fall_10.pdfcollege magazine and have been very impressed with the variety of programs and opportunities

QUEENS: The Magazine of Queens College 1

DEEP READINGS

SUMMER–FALL 2010, VOL. XV, NO. 2

QUEENSTHE MAGAZINE OF QUEENS COLLEGE

Marine geologist Cecilia McHugh—here, standing in front of sediment samples taken from under the seabed—gets to the core of her subject and catches the eye of the White House.

2 QUEENS: The Magazine of Queens College

THE QUEENS COLLEGE ANNUAL FUND

Our alumni and friends invest in the Queens College Annual Fund not because the college “needs money,” but because they want to change lives. ◆ With only a third of the college’s operating support coming from the state, gifts like yours make an

immediate difference in so many lives. ◆ Your gift helps to fund scholarships, academic programs, technological upgrades, research initiatives, and so much more.

Help Change a Life Support the Queens College Annual Fund

VISIT www.qc.cuny.edu/SupportQC OR CALL 718-997-3920

What would

be missing without

your support?


10

Super Students

12 Brother Act

Bruce Felton

18Better Living Through Chemistry

Donna Shoemaker

20Oceans of Knowledge

Donna Shoemaker

22A Lifelong Puzzle

Leslie Jay

24Their Own Medicine

Leslie Jay

S E C T I O N S 4 News

8 Athletics14 Calendar of the Arts

16 Bookshelf26 Giving Back28 Alumni Notes

ASSISTANT VP FOR COMMUNICATIONS | Maria TerroneEDITOR | John Cassidy

CREATIVE DIRECTOR | Dyanne MaueDESIGN MANAGER | Georgine Ingber

STAFF DESIGNER | Jefferson Caballero STAFF WRITERS | Leslie Jay, Maria Matteo,

Jacquelyn Southern, Phyllis Cohen Stevens, Bob Suter

PHOTOGRAPHER | Nancy Bareis

MAILBAGQC ACTIVISTSI read with great pleasure the piece “Activists Honored in Virginia” in the last issue of Queens Magazine. Many of these alumni remain involved with the QC community, and some of them—including Stan Shaw, Mike Wenger, Phyllis Pader Sederbaum, and Debby Yaffe—have donated their priceless materials relating to their Virginia experiences to the college’s department of special collections and archives. These letters, memos, posters, and photographs will help researchers study the events of the Civil Rights Movement and give our current students the opportunity to experience a real connection to this important moment in our history. We are profoundly grateful to these donors and look forward to preserving their materials so that their stories will continue to be told.Annie Tummino, Assistant Archivist, Department of Special Collections and Archives

LAST ISSUE’S COVERWhile I enjoyed the article on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita in the last issue, I did not enjoy the cover photo, which appears to give a strong nod towards Middle-East terrorist garb (sans the Israeli, American, British, and Korean !ag segments). While I will have to assume that was not the intent of the illustra-tor (and editor), I think it was a poor choice of image, and an amateurish and poorly executed illustration which did nothing to “illustrate” the nature of the story.Merrill Greenberg ’75, Palo Alto, CA

TIMES HAVE CHANGEDI have received the last two issues of the college magazine and have been very impressed with the variety of programs and opportunities described. It is hard to believe that this is the same school I attended from 1966–1970. My recollections from those years include being denied admission to the library and certain classes if I wore jeans

or pants to school. I clearly remember the nightmarish lines for registering for classes, the overwhelming fear of entering the cafete-ria with no sorority or house plan af"liation, and the six-hour gap between classes during my freshman and sophomore years. There was no student union at the time. I was con-sidered lucky to be admitted to the freshman class of 1966—high test scores and high school grades were required for that particu-lar class. Having stated all this, I received a good education and it was free. Rita Lieberman Hulstedt ’70, Bayside, WI

CROWN OR PHOENIX?I discovered an error in the very interesting story about Steve Appel, the student editor of the Knight News (Q Magazine, Spring 2009). The story said that when the college was founded in 1937 the student newspaper was named Phoenix. That is incorrect. It was called the Crown. I saw the paper starting in 1939 when my brother was a QC student. Then in 1947 I enrolled as a freshman and was soon thereafter sports editor of the Crown. It was still the same when I graduated in 1951. I went on to a news business career of more than 50 years.Dick Richter ’51, Issaquah, WAEditor’s Note: Dick is right. The Phoenix !rst appeared in 1959.

Send your letters to Queens: The Magazine of Queens College, Queens College, Kiely Hall 808, Flushing, NY 11367 or [email protected].

From left: Chris and Vince Misiano and Gus Makris went from creating a student !lm starring Jerry Seinfeld to working on some of TV's most celebrated shows (see p. 12).

QUEENSTHE MAGAZINE OF QUEENS COLLEGESUMMER–FALL 2010, VOL. XV, NO. 2

COPYRIGHT © 2010 BY QUEENS COLLEGE.

Cov

er: C

ecili

a M

cHug

h; p

hoto

grap

hy b

y D

on H

amer

man

.

CORRECTIONBernice Saperstein ’49 has pointed out that, contrary to what was stated in our last issue, Lee Nadler ’69 was not the "rst QC student accepted into Harvard Medical School, as Philip Bromberg ’49 attended the school earlier. Ron Newman ’66 also reports that Thomas Sos ’64 was at Harvard Medical School several years before Lee.


QUEENS NEWS

Pyong Gap Min (Sociology) is now Queens College’s twelfth distinguished professor, a title bestowed by the City Univer-sity of New York on its !nest teachers and scholars.

Min is one of the na-tion’s leading authorities on Korean Americans and Asian American immigration. He is the author of Caught in the Middle: Korean Communities in New York and Los Angeles (1996), and Ethnic Solidarity for Economic Survival: Korean Green Grocers in New York City (2008), both of which examine the con"icts Korean Ameri-can merchants have faced in dealing with other American ethnic communities.

Min is also the found-ing director of the Research Center for Korean Commu-nity, the only academic center of its kind in America. The center was established in February with a $200,000 grant from a local Korean-born businessman who had originally planned to !nance a business studies program at another institution, Min says, but was persuaded that the Queens center would be of more value to the Korean community. Among other activities, the center plans to publish three or four research reports annually as well as hold quarterly lectures and an annual international conference. This year’s conference, on the theme of overseas Koreans’ transna-tional ties to their homeland, is planned for October 8–9.

Min’s path to the pinnacle of academia was arduous. He was born in a small village in South Korea, where his father was a poor rice farmer. His mother died when he was eight, and none of his six brothers and sisters survived childhood, Min says, because the family had no access to medical care.

Since he showed promise as a student, Min was sent to Seoul to attend high school. Life was hard, but after enter-ing Seoul National Univer-sity as a major in history, he started tutoring students who were preparing to take the university entrance exam. As a university education is highly valued in Korea, families who could afford it paid well for Min’s services.

After graduating, Min worked brie"y as a reporter and did more tutoring until he had saved enough to come to America. He enrolled at the University of Georgia, but had to transfer to Geor-gia State University after one semester when his money ran out.

To see himself through a master’s degree and two PhDs—in educational philosophy and sociology—Min found jobs as a janitor and a factory worker. He struggled with adjunct teaching positions until !nding the perfect academic home in 1987: QC’s sociology department. “I worried, maybe with my non-white background I would feel out of place,” he recalls. “But I never did.”

QC’s Newest Distinguished Professor Opens Research Center on Koreans

An emphasis on building community characterizes much of Sue Henderson’s (VP Institutional Advancement) description of the progress made in implementing the college’s strategic plan.

Citing the example of QC’s !rst residence hall, The Summit, she says, “We’ve not only built a residence hall, but we’ve created a thriving residence hall life for it. We’ve hired more people in the student services area and we now have far more activities during

free hour and many more active clubs. So all of our students have bene!ted from the opening of The Summit.”

Henderson also cites the revived Undergraduate Research Mentoring Education program that brings students into QC’s community of faculty researchers. “This leads to more stu-dents who will stay with us to do graduate work, so it’s a win

for us in many ways. “Another component of community is recognition of

our diversity,” she says. “We have a large number of Asian students, and this fall we will begin what we call the Year of China.” This program, funded by the QC Founda-tion, will engage faculty, staff, students, and community members in a yearlong exploration of all things China (see p. 25).

“Also, we are tying a lot of the curriculum in with our Education Abroad program. For example, we invite all students to go abroad, even freshmen. They spend three nights in The Summit and then travel for two weeks and take a mini-course. It’s an introduction to higher education that helps them form a connection with one another that carries over to the school year.

“As we build our community, we also want to make sure that it’s green,” she continues. “Thanks to Kathy Cobb’s (VP Finance & Administration) leadership, in every decision we make, we now ask ourselves: How can we do this in a more sustainable manner?

“Another major aspect of the strategic plan is diversifying our funding streams, and we have done a much better job of that in the last three years,” Henderson notes. “Our endowment has gotten large enough that we’ve hired an investment !rm, and the Founda-tion board is pretty aggressive at keeping their feet to the !re to make sure our portfolio keeps moving forward.”

Henderson even !nds a silver lining in the troubled economy. “The latest budget cuts have been something of a blessing because they’ve made us stay focused on our priorities, seek ef!ciencies and more effective ways to bring alternative revenue into the college, as well as thinking of more creative ways to deliver courses.”

College Continues to Implement Its Strategic Plan

An important part of the college's Strategic Plan is to encourage more students to travel abroad.


In spring 2009 !rst-year students and seniors at QC were asked to participate in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). The results con!rm what anyone who has spent time on campus can readily observe: QC students are actively engaged in learning and in enrich-ing activities that lead to learning—and they like Queens College.

Launched in 1999 at Indiana University, the NSSE provides colleges and universities with information that can be used to improve undergraduate education. QC is among 616 schools that participated in the 2009 survey.

“Our students were initially invited to participate via email, and a subgroup of non-respondents received the paper surveys,” reports QC’s Institutional Research Director Meg McAuliffe. “In all, 351 !rst-year students and 212 seniors responded.”

The survey posed 42 key questions about classroom participation, interaction with faculty, and time spent on enriching activities. Among the !ndings: Students are glad

they chose Queens: 80 percent of !rst-year students have a favorable image of the school, and 87 percent of seniors said they would choose QC again.

First-year students also feel QC places substantial emphasis on academics (76%); they fre-quently work harder than they thought they could to meet faculty expectations (56%); they frequently discuss readings or ideas from coursework outside of class (55%); they frequently have serious conversations with those of a different race (52%); and they frequently have seri-ous conversations with students who are different from themselves in terms of their religious, political, or personal beliefs (55%).

Archive Fellows Helping QC Get Its Stuff TogetherLike any 73-year-old, Queens College has accumulated a lot of stuff.

In this instance, however, much of this stuff has signi!cant historic value. With the initiation three years ago of the Rosenthal Library’s Special Collections Fellows Program, these items are being systemati-cally evaluated, organized, and preserved in a manner that will serve researchers and scholars for years to come.

As Ben Alexander, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies (GSLIS) and the head of special col-lections and archives for the Queens College Libraries, recalls, when

Fellows Katie Hughes and Kevin Schlottmann with archives head Ben Alexander in the archives in Rosenthal Library.

he !rst arrived at QC he was given a tour by Library Director Robert Shaddy of what then passed for the college’s special collections and archives. “It was in a state of disarray. The college had had a part-time archivist, but it was a situation where a part-time staff member simply couldn’t deal with the volume of materials that the college had.”

Following several conversations, they decided to create a pilot proj-ect whereby students working toward the certi!cate in archival studies would be invited to participate in the fellows program. “It gives them a very intimate exposure to working in an archive,” Alexander explains. “They’re organizing and describing materials to make them accessible; joining me in visits to prospective donors to get the experience of going out in the !eld and assessing materials.” For their efforts they receive a full-semester independent study course credit.

The program’s most notable accomplishment has been the creation of the Queens College Civil Rights Archive, which was largely made possible by donations of artifacts from former QC students—beginning with Mark Levy ’64—who worked in the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. It continues to grow and gain recognition as a scholarly resource and is in the process of making many of its elements available via a related website at www.archives.gslis.net.

Other signi!cant collections being archived by Special Collections fellows include: the Ann Birstein Papers, which feature correspondence between the QC graduate and her husband literary critic Alfred Kazin, as well as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and others; the Karol Rathaus Col-lection, which holds scores, manuscripts, and correspondence from the noted composer and former QC professor; the K. Robert Schwarz Col-lection contains papers of the QC alumnus and classical music scholar; and the QC Presidential Papers covering the presidency of Shirley Strum Kenny (1984–94).

This fall the program’s focus will shift to two projects: One is the processing of a vast collection of theatre-related materials from the college’s performing arts collection, which includes Playbills dating back to the 1930s donated by the wife of actor Dom DeLuise. The other project will create an archive of the college’s collection of about 1,000 rare books, including some dating back to the 1450s.

Survey Finds Students Are Happy with Queens College

Happy at Queens College: Sarah Leibowitz ’13, one of the !rst students to live in The Summit, the college’s !rst residence hall, says, “The great thing about The Summit is that I feel so much a part of the community. It’s what I had always hoped college would be like, with friends who slowly become family.”


When Bright Sheng ’84 wanted to build on the education he received at the Shanghai Conserva-tory of Music, he enrolled in the master’s program at Queens College, where his teachers included George Perle and Hugo Weis-gall. Now the celebrated composer and pianist has returned to his alma mater: He’s the visiting distin-

guished artist-in-residence at the Aaron Copland School of Music for 2010.

During his visits to cam-pus in the spring semester, Sheng taught an advanced performance class in which select students tackled tra-ditional and contemporary chamber repertoire. He also presented “A Disen-tangling Musical Journey,” a series of four public lectures

on his unique experience as a Chinese-born, Western-trained composer who survived the Cultural Revo-lution. Some of the lectures involved demonstrations on Chinese instruments.

Sheng’s residency will continue in the fall, when he will conduct the Cop-land School orchestra in his composition Nanking! Nanking!

Gardaphé and Hahn Receive Major HonorsTwo of Queens College’s distinguished professors—Fred Gardaphé (English and Italian-American Studies) and Kimiko Hahn (English)—have received major academic distinctions.

Gardaphé has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar teaching fellowship for the 2010–11 academic year, dur-ing which he will lecture on American cultural studies at the University of Salerno in Italy. He will teach courses that explore how the humor expressed in major U.S. cultural works—by artists as diverse as Mark Twain and

Chris Rock—re"ects the nation and its people across a signi!cant period of historical development. “I want Ital-ian students to understand the changes large and small wrought upon the American identity, and I want them to understand the role humor plays in American media arts,” he says.

The John Simon Guggen-heim Memorial Foundation recently announced that Kimiko Hahn has been awarded a fellowship “on the basis of achievement and exceptional promise.” Hahn is the author of eight

books of poems, including Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), recipient of an American Book Award; and most recently Toxic Flora, poems inspired by both ordinary and rari!ed !elds of science (Norton, 2010). She will use the fellowship to work on a new collection of poetry.

Celebrated Composer Bright Sheng ’84 in Residence at Copland School

Larry Liebovitch Named Dean of Math and SciencesAfter a national search, Queens College has appointed Larry Lie-bovitch dean of the division of mathematics and natural sciences. Formerly associate dean for graduate studies and programs at the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science at Florida Atlantic University, he succeeds Thomas Strekas (Chemistry), who served as dean from 2003 to 2009.

An alumnus of the Bronx High School of Science, Liebovitch holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from City College and a master’s and doctorate in astronomy from Harvard. He returned to the city for post-doctoral fellowships in ophthalmology, !rst at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and then at the College of Physi-cians and Surgeons of Columbia University, eventually joining its faculty. Living in Astoria, he commuted to Manhattan by bicycle. In 1993 he accepted a job at the interdisciplinary Center for Com-plex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, where he rose through the academic ranks—becoming associ-ate dean in 2008—and pursued research in topics ranging from genetics to archaeology and psychology.

“My path in research is a single line, just bent in places,”

says Liebovitch, explaining that the mathematical models he used in astronomy and ophthalmology have applications in other !elds. “I par-ticularly enjoy discovering how what we know in one area of science can give us new insights into other areas of science.”

“The newness of science lies in the complexity of research,” observes QC Provost James Stellar. “Larry’s work has moved from the study of galaxies to the study of

"uid "ow in the eye and analysis of human con"ict. He will gal-vanize the sciences at Queens and get us better integrated with the sciences in CUNY and in the New York area.”

With this position, Liebovitch returns to his city roots. He spent his childhood in the Bronx and his wife, Rita, grew up in Flushing and earned a BA in sociology from Queens College.

QUEENS NEWS


SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2PRESIDENT’S RECEPTION for Classes of ’50, ’60 & ’65, 6:30–8:30 pm

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 3ALUMNI DAY, 10 am–5 pm. Speakers include novelist Susan Isaacs ’65; Robert Merkin ’77 and Peter Calandra ’82, who will discuss working on the origi-

nal production of Little Shop of Horrors (with performances)

■ Alumni Hall re-dedicated to honor Renée Kroll Zarin ’54

■ Tributes to classes of ’50, ’60, ’65, ’70, ’75, ’80, ’85, ’90, ’95, ’00 & ’05

■ Special reunions for young alumni and members of the Phoenix News, Newsbeat, Hillel, Dead End Boys, and Alpha Lambda Alpha

■ Sporting events, campus tours, museum visits

■ Breakfast, luncheon, and closing reception

HOMECOMING WEEKEND OCTOBER 2–3!

Most colleges would be honored to have a single National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Award recipi-ent. Queens College has six current recipients—all of them assistant professors and recent hires in the sciences.

“These substantial grants both honor and support outstanding research efforts by promising young scientists early in their careers,” says Dean of Research and Graduate Studies Richard Bodnar. “The money also enables graduate and undergraduate students to do meaningful work in the labs of these faculty members.” Brief descrip-tions of the winners and their research follow.

“For several reasons, a majority of deaf high school graduates in the U.S. have at best only a fourth-grade English reading level, but many of these adults have sophisticated "uency in American Sign Language (ASL),” says Matt Huenerfauth (Computer Science, hired 2006). “So, software that can present information in the form of ASL animations, or automatically translate English text to ASL would im-prove these persons’ access to websites, communication, and informa-tion.” Huenerfauth’s lab uses a range of motion-capture equipment—including gloves with sensors, special body suits, and eye-trackers—to digitize the movements of humans performing ASL sentences, which differ in structure and word order from English. “By analyzing the patterns in how humans perform ASL signs, we can produce animated virtual human characters that produce more realistic ASL move-ments,” Huenerfauth says.

Seogjoo Jang (Chemistry & Biochemistry, hired 2005) is con-ducting research on the development of computational methods for energy "ow dynamics in soft optoelectronic molecular systems. His work promises to have “a broad impact on the development of meth-ods that could lead to new advances in optics as well as electronic and sensor devices,” says Jang. Recently he received the $75,000 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, which also supports promis-ing young faculty.

Heng Ji’s (Computer Science, hired 2008) work has important implications for researchers looking to automatically retrieve and track information from unstructured, machine-readable documents. “Ideally, you would initiate a search for information on a given topic and the program would automatically extract and track relevant infor-mation in all languages,” she says. “The program would then generate a summary of relevant !ndings.”

The research of Jianbo Liu (Chemistry & Biochemistry, hired 2006) focuses on the use of mass spectrometry and ion/molecule reaction techniques to study the reactions of biologically important

molecules with reactive oxygen species. Oxidation of biomolecules is an important biological process associated with aging, disease, and photodynamic therapy for cancer. “We also hope to discover and develop new methods and techniques in analytical chemistry and nanotechnology,” says Liu.

Alexey Ovchinnikov (Mathematics, hired 2009) is developing ef!cient algorithms that can be used to solve differential and differ-ence equations. “These will have practical applications everywhere differential equations are used—in physics, biology, chemistry, and the sciences in general,” says Ovchinnikov.

With the Internet emerging as the main platform for computa-tion, individuals have become increasingly reliant on cryptography to ensure privacy and security in their day-to-day activities and protect their personal information from unauthorized access. “However, the design of many cryptosystems does not adequately account for new computational and cryptographic attacks made possible by advances in quantum computing and complex protocol interactions on the Internet,” says Hoeteck Wee (Computer Science, hired 2008). The focus of his project lies in the design and analysis of new crypto-graphic protocols that address these new attacks.

Clockwise from top left: Seogjoo Jang, Alexy Ovchinnikov, Hoetek Wee, Heng Ji, Jianbo Liu, and Matt Huenerfauth.

Recognition Comes Early for Six Young Science Faculty

Tickets are $35. Register by September 10 to save $10 and earn a chance to win an APPLE IPAD. To register, visit http://qchomecoming.eventbrite.com/?discount=EARLY; email [email protected]; or call 718-997-3930.


QUEENS ATHLETICS

Led by ECC Player of the Year Laura Mocodeanu

(left), the Knights Women’s Tennis Team posted a 21–4 record (5–0 in

ECC play), winning their "rst NCAA Regional Championship since 1995 and "nishing "rst in the ECC. (They also made it to the NCAA Division II Round of 16.)

Mocodeanu, a junior, earned a ranking of fourth in the entire East Region in singles—an achievement all the more remarkable in light of a shoulder injury that

prevented her from serving overhand. The ECC also selected Alan Nagel Coach of the Year and Erika Goldsmith as Rookie of the Year.

QC’s other ECC Player of the Year was Men’s Basketball standout Khaleef Allicott (right). He is only the second Knights player to be so honored by the ECC. He was also selected "rst team all-ECC, all-Metropolitan Basketball

Writers Association, and 2009–2010 Daktronics NCAA Division II Men’s

Basketball "rst team East All-Region.

Allicott concluded his four years at QC as the seventh all-time leading scorer with 1,583 points.

Allicott and Mocodeanu also shared honors when both received the prestigious Silver Knights Award at the 2010 Queens College Athletics Awards Dinner on May 24.

QC’s Men’s Tennis Team overwhelmed Dowling to clinch the 2010 East Coast Conference Men’s Tennis Championship. They went on to the NCAA Championship

SPRING SPORTS ROUNDUPby Bob Suter

Championship performances by the Women’s and Men’s Tennis

Teams and the selection of two Knights as East Coast Conference

Players of the Year highlighted the achievements of Queens

College athletes this spring.

Phot

o: M

arce

llo C

utti,

Jr. (

left)

, N

eal K

aufe

r


Round of 16, where they were eliminated by top-ranked Valdosta State, concluding their winning season with a 19–3 record. Craig Schwartz was chosen 2010 East Coast Conference Coach of the Year and "ve of his players were named all-conference. Junior Robby Scheuing, with an impressive 3.969 GPA as a business marketing major, was named the 2010 ECC Men’s Tennis Scholar-Athlete of the Year.

This year QC served as the host school for both the Women’s and Men’s NCAA Division II East Region #2 Tennis Region-als.

While completing its "rst season of varsity play with a losing 2–12 record (1–6 in ECC), QC’s new Women’s Lacrosse Team nevertheless produced the ECC Rookie of the Year in the person of Sarah Boucher.

Similarly, the Men’s Baseball Team, despite a losing 18–28 record (10–20 in ECC play), saw senior Jeffrey Gomez named 2010 second team all-East Coast Conference in a poll taken of the league’s head coaches. Gomez, who had a .300 season batting average, was selected as a designated hitter.

The Women’s Fencing Team, which posted an 8–6 record, saw seven of its players qualify for the NCAA Regionals.

On April 15, Softball Coach Brian DeMasters achieved a milestone, notching his 500th win in a contest with Bridgeport. The Softball Team "nished "fth in the ECC with a 12–16 record (16–31 overall).

Speaking of SportsA special alumni roundtable March 18 brought together a group of QC grads who’ve found success in sports or the business of sports. Joining QC freshman and Knights sportscaster Alex Garrett (center) are (l-r) Olympic medalist Gail Marquis ’80, NBA Executive Counsel Harvey Benjamin ’61, New York Mets and New York Islanders sportscaster Howie Rose ’77, and Emmy Award-winning sports television producer Michael Weisman ’71.

From left: Sarah Boucher, Jeffrey Gomez, and Erika Goldsmith were all bright spots on this year’s teams.

Phot

os: B

rian

Bal

lweg

(lef

t and

cen

ter)

, M

arce

llo C

utti,

Jr. (

righ

t)


This year’s graduating class is full of intriguing stories

MAX ROLL In his years at QC, Max Roll ap-peared in more than a dozen plays and operas, including Our Town, The Playboy of the Western World, and The Marriage of Figaro. Now he’s taking his act to New Haven, Connecticut. Af-ter a series of auditions in which nearly 1,000 people competed for 16 slots, Roll won admission to the Yale School of Drama with a full, three-year scholarship. “I owe everything to Claudia Feldstein,” says Roll, speaking of the QC drama, theatre, and dance professor—and Yale alumna—who coached him. “I couldn’t have done it without her support and preparation. I’m also very grateful to Charles Repole and Susan Einhorn for their support and guidance over the years.”

The English-born drama major had a different performing career in mind when he arrived at QC in 2004. “I initially came here to study with a fabulous American clarinetist, Charles Neidich,” says Roll, the son of two concert pianists. “I’d done a couple of small school shows in the United Kingdom, but up until a few years ago, it was clear I was going to be a musician.”

He reconsidered that plan after Drama Chair Charles Repole urged him to explore the stage. “Max was in the hallway, talking in his British accent,” recalls Repole. “He was tall, good-look-ing, and spoke beautifully—he was a leading man. So I grabbed him and asked if he was interested in acting. It’s been a joy to watch him grow and to support him.”

A small role as an American salesman in Pajama Game led Roll to bigger theatrical challenges and, ultimately, a new career goal. “I derived a different kind of pleasure from acting,” he explains.

“I became more involved and found myself taking auditions. Even being in a tech rehearsal for 10 hours was not tedious.” His musical background has not been wasted: Because sing-ing skills are invaluable to an actor, he took voice lessons with Bruce Norris, co-director of QC’s Opera Studio, for two years. Roll still plays clarinet for fun and pro!t, accepting the occa-sional gig. “A lot of training went into it and I don’t want to lose it,” he says.

SANDRA JODHA-SIRKISOON’S life path has taken her from a village on the island of Trinidad that had no running water or electricity to graduating from Queens College with an under-graduate degree in sociology.

As a child she had to walk to elementary school a mile from

home, often under a scorching sun. When she was six, her father suffered a stroke that kept him bedridden for the rest of his life. Her mother Samdai took over as the family’s breadwinner.

Although her mother was illiterate, she insisted that all her children go as far as they could in their education. So when Sandra !nished high school, she headed for New York, graduating in 1983 from Queensborough Community College with an associate degree in business management.

In 1988 Sandra married Surren Sirkisoon, an immigrant from Guyana who later earned an engineering degree from City College. When the !rst of their three children was born in 1992, Sandra traded full-time employment for playgrounds, reading groups, and a stint as PTA president at her children’s school. But it wasn’t enough to satisfy her, and in 2007 Sandra enrolled at Queens College.

“I was a little afraid I wouldn’t be able to cope with being at a large campus with so many young people,” she says. “But I so much enjoy learning, and my professors and classmates were all very helpful and encouraging.” Sociology professor Nicholas Alexiou “reassured me that I will do just !ne.”

He was right. The sociology department recognized her academic achievements at graduation with the Seiler Memorial Award. Sandra plans to earn a master’s degree in education at Queens College.

RICHARD BUBBICO When Richard Bubbico isn’t acting on stage or working in the lab, you might !nd him waiting tables in the Zen-garden-like interior of the DuMont restau-rant in Brooklyn, or collecting rocks on the jagged windswept hills of Greenland.

Bubbico, who graduated with a BS in geology this spring, isn’t afraid to throw himself wholeheartedly into new ven-tures. He already had one degree under his belt: a

SUPERSTUDENTS

Five distinguished new alumni (l-r): Max Roll, Sandra Jodha-Sirkisoon, Richard Bubbico, Sharon Tran, and Frances Tran.


BFA in drama from New York University in 1997. After graduating he began acting on stage and in TV produc-

tions and commercials. But after a few years he got married and started a family. “I wanted something more stable, something that would let me return home for dinner at night,” he says.

So in 2006 Bubbico enrolled in an undergraduate program at Queens in geology, a subject that could satisfy his love of the outdoors and traveling.

He wasn’t disappointed. In 2009 Bubbico joined a small geology expedition to Greenland with his professor, Hannes Brueckner (Earth & Env. Sciences). They got there via a sched-uled "ight to Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, then a small plane to an oil company air!eld in Constable Pynt, Greenland, and !nally a helicopter "ight to the country’s east coast. There the group camped in tents for three weeks.

The terrain was rugged, rocky, and treeless. But the trickiest part of being there, says Bubbico, was learning to sleep in the midnight sun. He and his professor brought back a carry-on bag full of carefully chosen rock samples that they have been analyzing since their return. The research may expand our un-derstanding of the mountain-building processes, says Bubbico.

Bubbico, who had a 3.962 GPA at the end of his last term at Queens and a number of awards to his name—including the NYC Brown!eld Consortium Scholarship and the QC Young Scientist Award—has applied for a QC graduate program in geology and would like to become a professor. “I’m having a good time studying geology,” he says. “I hope it can be a next career for me.”

SHARON & FRANCES TRAN To say that Sharon and Frances Tran have much in common would be an understatement. The twins both majored in Eng-lish and minored in Chinese. Each had to weigh full-scholarship offers for English PhD programs at prestigious universities.

(Frances chose the CUNY Graduate Center and Sharon picked UCLA.) And

each recently had a paper accepted by the Nation-

al Conference on

Undergraduate Research—for the second year in a row. They presented their papers at this year’s conference, in April, at the University of Montana.

“They’re exceptionally talented and motivated students,” says Duncan Faherty (English), the Trans’ faculty advisor. “Their intellects complement each other. They push each other quite hard.”

The papers the sisters presented in Montana re"ect their shared interest in how Asian-American authors deal with the changing meanings of kinship, identity, and nationality in a rapidly globalizing world. Both wrote about how characters in a novel struggle to de!ne who they are. (Frances chose The Love Wife by Gish Jen, a Chinese-American; Sharon picked Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee, a Korean-American.)

The sisters say the issues Asian communities in America face are not unique. Indeed, Asian-Americans and African-Ameri-cans have more in common than is often assumed, says Sharon: they “have a shared history of racism and discrimination.”

The sisters’ academic focus comes at least in part from their own history. Their parents and grandparents emigrated from Vietnam, and the sisters were raised by their grandparents in Astoria for their !rst years, until the family moved to Little Neck, Queens. They still speak Vietnamese at home.

Their parents set high standards, telling the girls they “have to constantly do better,” says Frances. “The pressure only came off after we were accepted into the Macaulay Honors College.”

The twins, whom people often have trouble telling apart, are each other's biggest backers. “We always read each other’s papers and bounce ideas off one another,” says Sharon. “Some-times we even get a little competitive.”

When they are not studying, the sisters like reading—and writing—manga, Japanese-style comics, and watching anime, as its animated form is called. They also play volleyball on the QC Quad. Both envisage careers as English professors.


Brother Act How Chris and Vince Misiano became two of television’s most sought-after directors

By Bruce FeltonBack in the mid-1970s, two brothers from Queens and a couple of their buddies got together and decided to make a movie.

Childhood friends Christopher Misiano ’76 and Jerry Seinfeld ’76 were students at QC; Christopher’s older brother Vince had graduated from QC in 1972 and was teaching high school English. Constantine Makris ’72—“Gus” to everyone who knew him—had also graduated and was working on a master’s in communications at Brooklyn College.

“We borrowed a 16mm camera from the school and shot a 10-minute !lm called Paree,” says Vince. “I wrote and directed, Gus and Chris did the photography, and Jerry played a kid who grows up in the country and makes his !rst foray into the big city.” No one knows where the only copy is or even if it exists, but that doesn’t seem to matter much. As both Misiano brothers are quick to admit, Paree, though an ambitious effort, was neither polished nor pro!cient. Even so, it had its moments, says Chris, “including a Chaplinesque title sequence by Jerry.”

But Paree marked a critical juncture for the young !lmmakers. “For the !rst time, !lmmaking became a practical goal for us,” says Vince. After graduating, Chris and Gus went to work as studio grips and later as photography assistants; Vince left teaching and

became a buyer for J.C. Penney. “It was a good job, but I felt mis-placed,” Vince says. “So Chris and Gus suggested that I join them, and at 29 I became a production assistant, which largely meant fetching coffee and sodas for people. But I loved the energy and creativity of a !lm set. It was like the circus.”

This was the 1980s, when there was little TV production taking place east of Hollywood, so the Misiano brothers worked mostly on commercials and the occasional rock video and made-for-TV movie. “We also did make-believe commercials,” says Chris. “Jerry was big by then, doing stand-up appearances on the ‘Tonight Show,’ but he went out with us to a park in Astoria, where we !lmed him in fake ads for Nike, just for the practice and to build our portfolio.”

Meanwhile, “Law and Order” had made its debut on NBC, and Gus had signed on, rising to director of photography and later becoming the !rst of the four friends to win a directing gig. He would ultimately direct more episodes of “Law and Order” than anyone else in history and make his mark as director and producer on some of TV’s best-known series. Chris joined the show as a camera operator and in time directed his !rst episode. Vince fol-lowed and also earned a chance to direct.

In the coming years, Gus would


win three Emmys for cinematography. Jerry Seinfeld became—well, Jerry Seinfeld. And Chris and Vince went on to become two of Hollywood’s most in-demand TV directors. Their directing credits read like a program guide to the most critically acclaimed series of the past two decades: episodes of “Law and Order,” “The West Wing,” “ER,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Third Watch,” “Ally McBeal,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Prison Break,” and on and on. In 2003 Chris received an Emmy for directing the season !nale of “The West Wing,” which was also the last episode written by series creator Aaron Sorkin.

As intertwined as their careers are, each brother has an identi!able and unique view of the director’s craft. “I know a little bit about a lot of things—music, writing, literature, history,” says Vince. “Directing is a perfect profession for people like me—it caters to gen-eralists who are good at putting together the disparate pieces of a complex puzzle. There’s really little that I learned in or outside school that can’t be applied to directing.”

The most challenging aspect of directing for TV, he says, “is that you’re something of a gypsy. You move from show to show, each with its own crew, cast, and culture. You bring your own vision and artistic sensibility, but the show is up and running, so it’s a bit like jumping onto a moving train.”

Chris agrees. “When you direct an episode, you’re working within a template, although you certainly have the creative free-dom to shoot it your way. My approach is to read a scene over and

over until I get it and understand what the people are doing, why they’re doing it, and how the scene should actually take place. I try to make the camera and the shot accommodate the reality—not the other way around.”

Ideally, directing involves a happy collaboration with writers and actors, but some friction is inevitable. “I have a good history with actors, Don Johnson being the notable exception,” says Chris. “I was new, and directing an episode of ‘Nash Bridges.’ Don pushed back so hard that I went home and considered quitting.” But !rst he con!ded in Seinfeld, who was already starring in his iconic sitcom. “Jerry said, ‘You know, calm seas make for bad sailors.’ He was right, and I stayed.”

These days the brothers live a continent apart—Vince in Westchester, Chris in Los Angeles. But at any given moment, they’re likely to be crossing paths in mid-air, with directing gigs on both coasts. Geography notwithstanding, they remain close, sharing an agent and bunking at each other’s homes when they’re in town.

“A certain amount of sibling rivalry is inevitable,” says Vince, “but it passes quickly. We’re always on guard not to let it compromise the closeness of our relationship.” In accepting his “West Wing” Emmy in 2003, Chris made a point of saying that he was “ not the best director in my family.” Recalls Vince, “Chris could have used his time to thank all the people who could do him good professionally. Instead he mentioned me.”

In recent years, Vince and Chris have gotten back to QC from time to time—to talk to students at alumni roundtables, to advise on the making of promotional videos and, once, to !lm an on-location scene for “Law and Order.” “The ground-ing I got here in the liberal arts has been invaluable to me as

a director,” says Vince. For Chris, his time at QC “allowed me to wander through the halls of this career and learn what I might be good at. QC really helped me at a time when I needed to !gure out who I was—and what I wanted to do with my life.”

The Misiano brothers have directed some of the most popular and critically acclaimed television series of the last 20 years, including “Law and Order,” “The West Wing,” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” ABOVE RIGHT: Vince (l) and Chris will have a chance to collaborate later this year on “Law and Order LA,” which Chris will produce and Vince will direct.

Phot

o of

Chr

is M

isian

o: Je

sse

Gra

nt/G

etty

Imag

es


ONGOINGLOUIS ARMSTRONG HOUSE MUSEUMCorona, QueensGuided tours every hour on the hour (last tour 4 pm); Tues.–Fri., 10 am–5 pm; Sat. & Sun., 12 noon–5 pm. Closed Mondays, New Year’s Eve & New Year’s Day.$8 adults/$6 seniors, students, children, and groups of eight or more. Members free. For information, call 718-478-8274 or visit KupferbergCenterArts.org and click on Louis Armstrong House Museum.

SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER 8–OCTOBER 26

EDEN: Ceramics by Sin-ying Ho

Curated by Tara Mathison, Assistant Curator of the Queens College Art CenterExpressing her own experience as an Asian-Chinese living in North America, ceramist Sin-ying Ho has painted hundreds of "owers, combined with digital transfer-printed images, on 5- to 6-foot-tall porcelain vessels, creating a garden of cultures that hints at collision, symbiosis, fusion.Reception & Artist’s Talk: Wednesday, Sept. 15, 5–8 pm; Queens College Art Center, Free. Information: 718-997-3770

12SUN2ND ANNUAL FESTIVAL OF WORLD MUSIC & DANCEStarring Calpulli Mexican Dance Company, Ebony Hillbillies, Mar Salá, Moon Oak Joo Arts Center, and more. Enjoy a day of music, food, and fun outdoors at Queens College. Purchase delicious food from local vendors, or bring your own and picnic on the Quad while you relax and listen to the joyous sounds of a half-dozen bands from our borough’s home-grown (and growing) international music scene. Noon–6 pm, Free Admission.

SEPTEMBER 13–NOVEMBER 24 MARLENE TSENG YU:

Nature and CosmosA 40-year retrospective of brilliantly colored paintings by this interna-tionally recognized Taiwanese-born Queens artist reveals the power of the natural world and the artist’s visionary fusion of Eastern and mod-ern Western art forms and content. Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Free. Information: 718-997-4747

OCTOBER 5TUES

SHANGHAI STRING QUARTET with

guest artist Bright ShengWeigang Li, violin; Yi-Wen Jiang, violin; Honggang Li, viola; Nicholas Tzavaras, cello “If there is a string quartet currently in circulation that produces a more beautiful sound than the Shanghai Quartet, the name doesn't immediately come to mind.” The New York TimesLeFrak Concert Hall, 10 am.$15; $10 seniors, QC alumni, QCID

CHINA TODAY with Morris Rossabi

QC History Department Dis-tinguished Professor Rossabi is a historian of China and Central Asia. The author of several books and numerous articles and speeches, he has contributed to several volumes of the Cambridge History of China. Professor Rossabi travels extensively through central Asia and Mongolia. LeFrak Concert Hall, 2 pm, Free.

Kupferberg Center Performances is supported by the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Harkness Foundation for Dance, The Kupferberg Foundation, and the Max and Selma Kupferberg Family Foundation. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. Additional funding is provided by Queens Borough President Helen M. Marshall, New York City Councilman Jim Gennaro, and New York State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky. The Selma & Max Kupferberg Center for the Visual and Performing Arts supports special projects and initiatives for the Arts@Queens College. Funding for these projects has also been provided by New York Community Bank.

INFORMATION & TICKETS: 718-793-8080 OR KUPFERBERGCENTERARTS.ORG

YO U R G U I D E T O T H E ARTS BESTOF THE

Events with this symbol are part of our Year of China celebration. See page 25 for more information.

YEAR

CHINA

OF

Blue Crystal, 1998Queens International Folk Festival

Shanghai String Quartet


Subscriptions for the 8-concert series are $95. For information and reservations, call 718-997-3802. Concerts and personnel subject to change.

OCTOBER 5 Shanghai String Quartet with guest artist Bright ShengWeigang Li, violin Yi-Wen Jiang, violin Honggang Li, viola Nicholas Tzavaras, cello

OCTOBER 12 New Hudson Saxophone QuartetPaul Cohen, soprano Avi Goldrosen, alto Noah Getz, tenor Tim Reudeman, baritone

OCTOBER 19Musicians for HarmonyColin Jacobsen, violin Eric Jacobsen, cello Catherine Cho, violin Marcy Rosen, cello Diane Walsh, piano, and more . . .

OCTOBER 26Young Concert Artists in ConcertBella Hristova, violin, and Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano

NOVEMBER 9Shira Lissek, soprano and Arbie Orenstein, piano

NOVEMBER 16Lions Gate TrioFlorence Millet, piano Katie Lansdale, violin Marcy Rosen, cello

NOVEMBER 23Trio One-Oh-OneJosef Burstaller, trumpet Haim Avitsur, trombone David Jolley, French horn

NOVEMBER 30Brandenburg Concerti with Andrew Saderman and the Queens College Early Music Collective Susan Hellauer, Wendy Powers, and Dongmyung Ahn

Chamber Music 8 Incredible Concerts in LeFrak Concert Hall. Tuesdays at 10 am.

Live

VESTIGES OF THE SILK ROAD

IN CHINAThis illustrated talk is a virtual trip along the Silk Road that ran from China’s ancient capital Chang’an (modern Xi’an) to the oases of the Taklamakan Desert in eastern Cen-tral Asia. The talk will explore the art, culture, history, and geography of a region that once connected China to Europe and served as the trade route for exotic goods and the exchange of people, religions, and ideas. France Pepper, executive director of the Shen Wei Dance Arts, has been traveling and researching the Silk Road for over 20 years, and has curated over 300 programs on all aspects of traditional and contempo-rary China and Asia. LeFrak Concert Hall, 3 pm, Free.

Concert: Aaron Copland School of

Music Performing Faculty and Distinguished Artist-in-Residence Bright ShengLeFrak Concert Hall, 7:30 pm.$10 suggested donation.

22-24FRI–SUN BRIGADOONCharles Repole, director, Queens College OrchestraMaurice Peress, conductorThis stirring concert version of Lerner and Loewe’s enchanting musical about a mysterious Scottish village that appears out of the mist every 100 years is sure to touch your heart. A co-production of the Queens College Drama, Theatre & Dance Department and the Aaron Copland School of Music.Performances: Oct. 22 and 23 at 8 pm; Oct. 24 at 3 pm.LeFrak Concert Hall, $15; $13 se-niors, students, QC alumni, QCID

NOVEMBER NOVEMBER 4–DECEMBER 23 VOICES ENVISIONED: Memories Made in Northern IrelandCurated by Jill Strauss, Adjunct Professor, Dispute Resolution Program, Department of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal JusticeAfter decades of violent con"ict, Protestants and Catholics undertook a storytelling and visual art project in Portadown, Northern Ireland in 2008. The resulting artworks include three textiles and two mixed-media installations. The exhibition also doc-uments the workshop process leading to the creation of the artworks. Reception & Curator’s Talk: Thursday, November 4, 5–8 pm. Queens College Art Center, Free. Information: 718-997-3770

7SUN A FAR CRY This self-conducted chamber orchestra of 17 young musicians “has perfected a lush, sweet sound that is achingly alive and emotional,” proclaims Strings magazine.LeFrak Concert Hall, 2 pm.$36; $34 seniors, students, QC alumni, QCID

DECEMBER DECEMBER 9–JANUARY 13 WINDOWS AND MIRRORS: The War in AfghanistanOrganized by the American Friends Service Committee, Chicago Region Murals by artists from all over the U.S. commemorate the thousands of civilian deaths and the human cost of the Afghanistan war, little of which is revealed to the American public. Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Free. Information: 718-997-4747

11SATQC Choral Society’s 70th Annual Winter ConcertHANDEL’S MESSIAHJames John, Music DirectorRing in the holidays with Handel’s beloved Messiah, a work associated with the QC Choral Society since its inception in 1941. Colden Auditorium, 8 pm. $20; $18 seniors, students, alumni; $5 for students with valid QCID at box of!ce only.

26SUNTHE NUTCRACKER RUSSIAN-AMERICAN BALLET COMPANYBack by popular demand, Russian-American Ballet’s original version features dazzling Russian-trained dancers, exquisite costumes, and the beloved music of Tchaikovsky. Created and priced especially for family audiences. Colden Auditorium, 3 pm. $18; $12 children 12 and under!

Bright Sheng

Emma Buckley, Us and Them

Camels in the Pamir Mountains, courtesy of France Pepper


QUEENS BOOKSHELF

“First, do no harm,” is a fundamental rule for medical professionals. But some can’t follow it. Richard S. Klein ’62, a practicing physician on the faculty of New York Medical College, begins Surviving Your Doctors: Why the Medical System Is Dangerous to Your Health and How to Get Through It Alive (Rowman & Little!eld) with the declaration that every year at least 100,000 patients die in American hospitals because of malpractice. To keep readers from

becoming statistics, Klein shares his insights on routine questions—one chapter is called “Does Your Kid Really Need that Shot?”—major diseases, and surgical procedures. He also provides checklists

that will help people take an active role in their own health care.

To research her sixth novel for young adults, Rita Williams-Garcia MA ’97 soaked up the atmosphere of Beach Chan-nel and Benjamin N. Cardozo High Schools, among other city institutions. The result is Jumped (Harper Teen), a cautionary tale that unfolds in the alternating voices of three teenage girls: Letitia, a resentful under-performer assigned to makeup classes before the school day begins; Dominique, an athlete barred from the basketball court for low grades; and Trina, a "irtatious art student determined to be the center of attention. A faculty member in Vermont College’s MFA program in writing for children and young adults, Williams-Garcia has accumulated a trea-sure trove of awards—including the PEN/Norma Klein Award and Coretta Scott King Honor Book—for her previous titles. Extending that record, Jumped was a !nalist in the young people’s category for the 2009 National Book Awards.

A love story wrapped around a murder mystery, or maybe vice versa, Sloth (Green-point Press) is a postmodern mashup, rich in tricky wordplay and allusions to everything from Greek tragedy to the work of Dr. Seuss. The events are re-counted in the !rst person by a nameless,

underemployed, and possibly unreliable narrator who bor-rows his best friend’s identity to pursue an actress in a tele-vised exercise show. Mark Goldblatt ’79—not coinciden-tally the pen name of the protagonist’s

buddy, a newspaper columnist who has ceased writing—plays with the clichés of epistolary romance, pulp !ction, and other genres as he takes readers on a fast, funny ride. Author of a previous novel, Africa Speaks, Goldblatt is a widely published essayist and a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

In The Narrow Road to the Interior, Kimiko Hahn (English) played with two classical Japanese poetry forms. Toxic Flora (Nor-ton), her eighth collection, is united by theme rather than style: The 60 poems were written in response to articles published in the “Science” section of the New York Times. Contemplating topics that range from insects and extinct birds to astronomy, Hahn draws startling con-nections. “Oh, what we think we need to survive kills others; / I have consuming need for my beloved, he knows— / and I hope he is not sorry,” she muses in a poem about a unique "ock of bush wren destroyed in New Zealand at the turn of the 20th century by someone’s pet cat. This is fertile territory for Hahn, a CUNY Distinguished Professor and much-honored poet who plans to use her latest award—a Guggenheim fellowship—to work on her next collection, about botany, entomology, and marine biology.

Divorced dad and former New York Post reporter Charlie Carillo ’77 didn’t have to look far for inspiration for his second novel, Raising Jake (Kensington Books), a comic entry in the genre of father-son bonding. While his ex-wife is out of town, Sam Sullivan !elds a call from the

headmaster of the pricey Manhattan prep school that is supposed to groom his son, Jacob, for college. In short order, the elder Sullivan is !red from his job at a tabloid newspaper and Jake is expelled. Liberated by their

respective disasters, the two spend an entire weekend together, building the relationship that they have craved for years. “The best kind of journey, one you don’t want to end . . . funny, moving.”—Daily News columnist Mike Lupica

After studying Cuba in her !rst book, Latin American specialist Sujatha Fernandes (Sociology) headed farther south for Who Can Stop the Drums?: Urban Social Movements in Chavez’s Venezuela (Duke University Press), an account of everyday life and politics in the barrios of Caracas. Building on Karl Marx’s observation that people make history, but not under circumstances of their own

making, Fernandes summarizes decades of history as experienced by poor community activists. The majority of them credit leftist President Hugo Chavez with implementing

changes that improved their lives; nonetheless, they seek to maintain local control as they struggle for social and economic justice. “Original, timely, and important.”—Steve Ellner, author of Rethinking Venezuelan Politics: Class, Con!ict, and the Chavez Phenomenon


Formula for Success

Research is thriving at Queens College, where terrific new faculty have joined accomplished senior professors in breaking new ground and inspiring students to pursue scientific careers. In the following pages, we present field reports on some of our most talented teachers and alumni.

Don

Ham

erm

an


Better Living throughChemistry

By Donna Shoemaker

Hospital bedding that halts the transmission of disease . . . house paint that

blocks mold . . . clothing that offers protection from anthrax. In citing some

of the highly practical possibilities of his antibacterial/antifungal surface

treatments, organic chemist Robert Engel (Chemistry & Biochemistry) finds

one close by. His wife, Jeanne, informally tests one of his specially treated

hospital jackets. Month after month, it remains free of bacteria—that is, on

all but one non-treated patch sewn on as a control.


LEFT: Robert Engel in his laboratory with student Sonika Raj. BELOW: Engel tests how his modi!ed fabric surfaces will stand up to detergents. Engel, who served in the U.S. Army for two years, rising to the rank of captain, !rst approached the Army for support for his research on preventing tents from rotting and reducing bacterial infections caused by wounds.

Engel loves to rip apart the cellular structures of harmful bacte-ria, fungi, and mold. For the past 15 years he and the chemistry students he mentored—some of them now professors them-selves—have been working at treating surfaces to do just that.

A faculty member at Queens College for 42 years, Engel just completed a year as acting dean of the division of mathematics and natural sciences. On his watch, QC unveiled the $30-million Remsen Hall annex that added teaching and research labs. Eager to further student and faculty research, Engel keeps a !le on his desk of grant announcements. His teaching talents are legendary. As one student noted, “When this man lectures, it’s like celestial music resonating throughout perfection.”

In his lab, Engel has been launching not only marketable products but careers. His prophylactic coatings have enormous potential in health-care settings. “We know we can make them work against the nastiest things out there—among them E. coli and staph,” Engel explains. “We feel we have something signi!-cant for making people’s lives better.”

In many other areas, possibilities beckon. “Out on the battle-!eld, the main danger is infection,” says Engel, who came to QC after conducting research while in the Army. Making military uniforms antimicrobial would mean they could quickly be enlisted as sterile bandages. In construction, coating wood could reduce the “sick house syndrome,” Engel believes. “In the South, before a house is even !nished, it’s coated with mold. Wood treated with our approach prevents that from growing.” From his travels, he realizes that “A hotel is a very dangerous place, particularly the bedspreads, which don’t get washed very often.” To avoid infections, he advises, “Take some paper towels, grab the bedspread, and stick it in a corner.”

“Killing bacteria isn’t new,” Engel points out. “It’s been around for eons.” But with certain chemicals, “the dif!culty is that you need a tremendously high concentration to organize them to attack a bacterium to kill it. It’s like herding cats.”

In coaxing chemicals to go just where he wants them to go, Engel follows his curiosity into new territories of green solvents and environmentally friendly applications. His lab also creates pharmaceuticals that hold promise in preventing the transmission of disease. A Cornell Medical School researcher is using the lab’s organic salts to look into “regulating ionic transfer through heart muscle,” with a goal of preventing heart attacks, Engel notes.

Engel’s unusual research has been attracting attention abroad as well, including earlier funding from Johnson & Johnson in Great Britain for wound dressings. In mid-May, while in Vienna to attend a symposium, Engel spoke with representatives of sev-eral chemical companies, including one of Germany’s largest.

As the commercial possibilities increase, so do the com-plexities of turning lab research into marketable products. “I’m just the inventor,” says Engel. “I’m not a businessperson.” To surmount the obstacles of technology transfer, Engel gratefully turns to the entrepreneurship resources of QC and CUNY.

With the idea of marketing some of his lab’s discoveries, “A corporation has been set up to handle licensing and deal with the extensive paperwork required for Environmental Protection

Agency approval,” Engel notes. “The major investors who formed the corporation are particularly interested in fabric treatment,” he adds. To market additional applications, such as pharmaceuticals, paint, and wood, “Jake Maslow’s of!ce at CUNY [Technology Commercialization] is continuing to look for other investors,” Engel explains.

Faculty split 50/50 with CUNY any royalties from their intellectual property owned by CUNY, which then reinvests 25 percent of its half in the college where the inventor is employed. Royalties from university research can be extremely lucrative. En-gel’s !rst doctoral student, Dennis Liotta, ’70, ’72, ’74, who holds an endowed chair at Emory University, is co-inventor of the main anti-HIV drug, which has brought Emory multi-millions in revenue (see Q Magazine, Spring 2009).

Engel is enormously proud of Liotta and other former students, and at times continues research collaborations long after their graduation. JaimeLee I. Rizzo, ’98, ’00, ’01, a chem-istry professor at Pace University, “started with me as a junior doing synthesis in the lab,” Engel recalls, “and absolutely ran my research group.” She assisted Engel in researching ionic liquids, which led to changing surfaces to make them antimicrobial, and that eventually led to patents.

Next year Engel will have far more time to devote to his new corporation because he will be on sabbatical. Part of the time, he plans to conduct research in central Pennsylvania, where wife Jeanne has accepted a position as a hospitalist. It’s familiar turf for this Penn State PhD graduate. Getting back to herding polycationic strings, non-aqueous ionic liquids, and liquid ionic phosphates—all part of his research—has a great deal of appeal for Engel: “I haven’t run out of things to do in the lab.”

Phot

os: D

on H

amer

man


by Donna Shoemaker

As close as Sandy Hook Bay and as far away as the South Paci!c, Cecilia McHugh probes underwater secrets with a ma-rine geologist’s high-tech tools. Her curiosity spans prehistoric climate change to the origins of Haiti’s January 12 earthquake. By sampling ancient sediment cores, by mapping fault lines on seabeds, by analyzing toxic pollution in local estuaries, she seeks to understand geologic forces from a marine perspective. How is land massively shaken and reshaped? What can sediments tell us about why sea levels are rising globally? Can we predict when a tsunami will devastate a densely populated coast?

“I love to teach about the oceans,” says McHugh. A Queens College professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and faculty member of CUNY’s Graduate Center, she has made 20 research expeditions. “It’s very impressive to see the sea "oor, when you can walk it and touch it.”

This year, two extraordinary research opportunities drew

McHugh to sites half a world apart. Last winter, she took part in an “amazing” three-month research expedition to New Zealand, and shortly after headed an urgent expedition to Haiti.

Off the coast of New Zealand, on board the R/V JOIDES Resolution, as a sedimentologist McHugh studied “very deep holes that hold the history of global changes in sea level and climate,” she explains. The vessel’s drilling rig, eight stories high, brought up the deepest core (1,927 meters) ever drilled by one ex-pedition of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program in sediments. This sediment will give glimpses into sea level change as far back as 34 million years, when Antarctica separated from Australia. Analyzing other cores, “We were surprised at what we think were warm conditions during geologic periods generally accepted as cold. We thought the oceans had cooled much earlier,” she notes.

Returning January 16, McHugh knew what she had to do in response to the devastating quake. “I began to propose an expedition to Haiti,” she relates. Unlike the South Paci!c voyage that involved 300 international scientists and at least !ve years of planning, this time the principal investigators had to condense months of preparation into two weeks.

On board the R/V Endeavor from February 20–March 13, McHugh guided the research team in assessing the Haitian quake’s causes and why an unexpected tsunami had followed in its wake. Her team raced to document the ephemeral evidence before shallow waters dispersed it. PhD student Katie R. Mishkin was part of the expedition. It also involved several Haitian and U.S. geoscientists and opens up possibilities for bringing Haitian students to QC and CUNY.

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response expedition merged seismic science with a mission of mercy: trans-porting 40 huge donated tents to be set up for schools.

“It was an eerie feeling to go into the bay of Port-au-Prince,” McHugh recalls, for it was like a war zone with all the massive ships docked. “You could see smoke coming out of the city, you knew there were "attened buildings and 250,000 people dead there,” she relates.

With no visas, the Endeavor’s team could not go on shore. From in"atables during surveying, “We saw a huge amount of destruction, houses demolished, where the earth had slipped into the sea,” she notes. “Deforestation has a big impact on the soil when it gets wet.” Their survey delineated a potential site for a now-much-needed new port. She hopes to continue mapping the area, in part to show how compression played a much bigger part. “When you have compression, you have the danger of a

Oceans of KnowledgeCecilia McHugh examines the land beneath the sea

Katherine Ryan Mishkin (l) and Cecilia McHugh unravel the sedimentary history of the catastrophic January 12 earthquake in Haiti. Studying sediment cores and geophysical images from Haiti and other earthquake-prone countries will contribute to the understanding of the frequency at which these earthquakes occur and if the energy they release can potentially generate tsunamis.

Don

Ham

erm

an


thrust earthquake, and the danger of a thrust earthquake is a tsunami,” she says.

McHugh was invited to a March confer-ence in Miami to mobilize efforts to develop earthquake-resistant buildings for Haiti. She is grati!ed that the United Nations is using “all of the recommendations we made,” among them devising a prototype to take to villages to show masons how to construct sturdier homes.

The Obama administration was so im-pressed with McHugh’s work in Haiti that it was featured on the White House’s website. In her report on the Endeavor expedition, Kate Moran, senior policy analyst for the White House Of!ce of Science and Technology Policy, noted that the expedition was “led by a dynamic woman with a long record of mentor-ing students of all ages.” Moran’s words well capture McHugh. From a Buenos Aires family of scientists (her grandfather was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry), McHugh after high school emigrated from Argentina. The professor doesn’t mind telling her diverse students that “I didn’t speak English when I came here.”

McHugh’s life story is a lighthouse for the next generation of marine geoscientists—especially women and minorities. “There’s nothing like personal experience to excite them, to encour-age them to pursue a career in the sciences and to show them they can do it,” she believes. She relates with pride one example, a program fund-ed by an NSF grant to increase diversity in the geosciences. “We took minority students out to sea on the Long Island Sound and taught them marine aspects for a week. Not only did they declare majors, but they got their master’s and PhDs” (see www.explore-the-sound.org). Students have accompanied McHugh on international re-search expeditions as well, including to Turkey, where she began to develop the methods for submarine earthquake geology.

QC hired McHugh in 1993 after she completed her PhD at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her dissertation involved diving along New Jersey’s continental shelf, where she was thrilled to see its grand canyons. “When you dive with the sub, you see the contrast between the beautiful white chalk walls and the sea,” she found.

At Lamont-Doherty, “They take only 25 students from around the world every year,” McHugh says. She almost wasn’t one of them. “They had a big discussion when it came to my acceptance because of my being a married woman with two children who lived an hour away.” Since graduation, she has been an adjunct associate researcher there. Lamont-Doherty has co-sponsored several of her expeditions, including to Haiti.

Next year on sabbatical, McHugh heads back to Istanbul to study quakes. While !elding invitations from Oregon, Texas, Bra-zil, and Austria, she is making sure two QC minority undergrad-uates will be able to conduct research in Bangladesh. She kids how she is popular with students because “I give them salaries, research classes, and a full research background as an undergrad-uate, including presenting abstracts at conferences.”

Whether researching on Turkey’s Sea of Marmara, mapping fault lines near Haiti’s shores, or diving into California’s subma-rine canyons, McHugh thrives in her element of water worldwide.

McHugh (r.) and members of the Endeavor examine a gravity core that was just recovered. As it name implies, a gravity core pen-etrates into the sea"oor sediment by gravity (force is provided by lead weights on top of the core). After the plastic tube inside the pipe is removed, it is split into half and studied. The layers of mud provide information about their deposition; for example, a layer of sediment could have been deposited by a "ood, an earthquake, or a change is the position of the shoreline related to sea level.

Will

iam

Cra

wfo

rd, I

OD

P/TA

MU


Biologist Zahra Zakeri explores the mystery of cell death—and nurtures the next generation of scientists

A Lifelong PuzzleBy Leslie Jay

As a child, Zahra Zakeri (Biology) always wanted to know how things worked. “My nickname was Questions,” recalls the professor.

After more than 20 years of teaching at QC and investigating programmed cell death—the loss of cells for reasons other than accident—Zakeri’s curiosity and energy are unabated. In addition to directing the Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) pro-gram, leading undergraduate and graduate classes, conducting re-search, and publishing papers, she runs the International Cell Death Society, an organization she founded in 1994. In May she "ew to Stockholm as one of about 70 scientists invited to participate in a cell death conference honoring the bicentennial of the Karolinska Institute, which awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Zakeri is also a founding member of Scientists Without Borders, which presents workshops, conferences, and training sessions in nations whose scientists cannot easily travel. “Our aim is to educate people in third world countries,” she says.

An immigrant herself, Zakeri was in her mid-teens when her family left Iran and settled in Corona, Queens. She graduated from Newtown High School and enrolled at York College, intending to major in math. Her plans changed once she began working in the lab of Leslie Lewis, a biology professor specializing in genetics. “He was a fantastic teacher, with such dedication to the !eld,” Zakeri recalls. “I fell in love with biology.”

After completing her bachelor’s degree at York, she earned a master’s at Long Island University and a doctorate at St. John’s University, studying virology and tumor growth. In 1985 she entered a post-doctoral program at Columbia University, where she was eventually named a research associate. There, she became interested in cell death, a subject with huge scienti!c implications. Normal embryonic development involves cell death; so do many diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s. The ability to control this process could revolutionize medicine.

“It was a quiet !eld at the time,” Zakeri says. “I was lucky to be there at the beginning.” By 1990, when she started teaching at QC, she had already gotten her !rst grants for cell death research. Now she routinely receives major funding; in the last four years alone, she has won $8 million in educational and research grants. Her lat-est work concerns the role gender plays in disease. “We’re looking

at whether it matters if a cell is male or female,” she explains. Her team is also trying to !gure out how viruses like "u or Dengue manipulate cell machinery for their own bene!t.

Zakeri’s lab is open 24 hours a day, and her students—including eight undergraduates, three master’s students, two PhD candidates, and one visiting research scientist—put in long hours. So does their mentor, who has made a mission of helping younger people advance in scienti!c !elds. In the six years that she has run QC’s MARC program—funded by a unit of the National Institutes of Health—its participants have accumulated a slew of distinctions.

The spring semester was especially impressive. In February, MARC student Emmanuel Datan ’11 was among 35 people chosen to present research on host-pathogen interactions at the American Society of Microbiology’s meeting in Baltimore on Biodefense and Emerging Diseases. Barely a month afterward, MARC participant Andrew Hillman ’10 placed !rst for his poster presentation at the Student National Medical Association Conference in Chicago. Hillman reported on a promising therapy for children who have a type of cerebral palsy that affects only one side of their body. Closer to home, QC’s biology department selected MARC student Guy Surpris ’10 for the Colwin Award for outstanding research by a student not going to a health professional school. Surpris, who earned recognition for his project on how the Dengue virus manipulates cells and provokes an immune response, is studying immunology at Tufts University.

Other undergraduates MARC-ed for success include Marie-Pierre Payen ’10, who has enrolled in Boston University’s graduate program in neuroscience; Luis Vega ’10, who accepted a summer slot in Harvard’s immunology program; Joanne Broome ’11, who spent her vacation participating in neuroscience research at New York University; and Erica Rodriguez ’11, who, like Datan, won a summer internship at the Rockefeller University. Hillman, who plans to apply to medical school eventually, is weighing research opportunities at the National Institutes of Health.

“We are small but mighty—we are the mighty MARCs,” says Zakeri, unwittingly alluding to her own imposing presence, all 5 feet of it. “We are happy to carry the name of Queens College all over the world.”

FUTURE SCIENTISTS: Students working with Zakeri are doing research on how the in"uenza virus can induce cell death or keep a cell alive, how a viral gene can be used to manipulate cancer, and other topics. Front row l-r: Narges Zali, Fiorella Tapia-Ortiz, Lauren M. Alvarez, Zakeri, and Carlos Penaloza; second row: Dinah Han, Ali Shirazian, Vanessa Verdugo, Pierre Co, and Maria Entezarizaher (visiting scientist); third row: Daniel Sangobanwo, Alain Goldman, Samantha Boursiquot, and Jeffrey McLean. Don

Ham

erm

an



By Leslie Jay Rolande Hodel ’05 wasn’t among the presenters at a recent American Chemical Society (ACS) gathering at St. John’s Uni-versity in Queens. Nonetheless, colleagues greeted her like a VIP. “Rolande, you’re a big celebrity,” said one man en route to the registration table. Hodel broke into a modest smile.

She has reasons to be pleased. In 2008, in recognition of her efforts to set up locally owned pharmaceutical plants in Africa—a continent dependent upon imported medicines—ACS chose her as one of three recipients of the Astellas USA Foundation Award. Astellas, a drug company, estab-lished the prize in 2007 to honor people who contribute to research that improves public health; each winner receives a $30,000 grant. Hodel was also a semi!nalist in last year’s Buckminster Fuller Chal-lenge. Launched by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the program solicits proposals for addressing humanity’s worst problems.

Ironically, this accomplished chemist grew up in a household that thwarted her desire for an educa-tion. “I would probably have studied physics, but my stepmother and father didn’t let me go to school,” explains Hodel, an East German native raised in the western city of Kaiserslautern. At 15 she moved away from her family and jumped back on the academic track, earning high school and col-lege diplomas, followed by a master’s degree in psychology.

In 1988 Hodel came to the United States on vacation. “This is the country where I should have been born,” she says, citing, among other factors, “the ease of talking to people.” After travel-ing for two months, she "ew home and applied to U.S. graduate programs; the University of Kansas gave her a scholarship.

Upon completing a master’s in inorganic chemistry, she at-tended an ACS meeting in Washington, D.C. There, she learned about a job at a company that worked with nanocrystals. The company eventually folded, but not before sponsoring Hodel for a green card. Once again, she landed a position through her fellow chemists. “Someone at ACS gave my resume to someone in the pharmaceuticals business,” she recalls. “Two months later I was in New York, pushing insulin down the throats of rats.”

Determined to get a doctorate, Hodel enrolled in the PhD program at City College, CUNY; she’d !nished everything but her dissertation research at Kansas. Then she transferred to QC to continue her research under Harry Gafney (Chemistry), a member of her PhD committee. “There is no one better than Dr. Gafney, who was always there at the right time, but also let us make our mistakes,” says Hodel. Gafney returns the compli-ment. “Rolande was working in an interdisciplinary area between organic chemistry and nanotechnology,” he notes. “She forged ahead and we got it all done.”

She was weighing her next profes-sional step when she heard Brazilian President Lula De Silva talk to the United Nations about his country’s production of antiretroviral drugs to combat HIV and AIDS. “My inter-ests in peace, travel, and chemistry came together,” says Hodel. The result was AIDSfreeAFRICA (www.aidsfreeafrica.org), the organization she set up in 2005 to equip Africans to become self-suf!cient in making medicines. A nonpro!t, it got seed money from friends, family, the New Tudor Foundation, and the Weyman Foundation.

Today, AIDSfreeAFRICA has a license to import and sell the antifungal drug miconazole, made

by Belgium-based Tibotec. AIDSfreeAFRICA also collaborates with two groups in Cameroon: Genemark, a Douala-based company that mixes medicinal syrups; and Cameroonian Baptist Convention, a hospital in Mutangene that prepares intravenous "uids, eye drops, and ointments. Discussions are under way with Cinpharm, a company backed by the Indian generic manufac-turer Cipla and the German Development Bank.

A dual citizen of the U.S. and Germany, Hodel spends about two months a year in Cameroon, where she has a residential per-mit. She has an apartment in Ossining, NY, but doesn’t log much couch time, !lling her schedule with speaking engagements, fund-raising events, and a job teaching chemistry at Westchester Com-munity College. “I need capital for AIDSfreeAFRICA’s projects,” she says. “We issue loans and are looking for investors. We want to build an infrastructure that provides jobs, is self-sustainable, and does not depend on handouts. If I had half a million dollars today, I’d be in full-blown production in 12 months.”

To supply Africa with affordable drugs, chemist Rolande Hodel is establishing pharmaceutical plants in the SubSaharan region

Their Own Medicine

On a trip to Bamenda, Cameroon, Hodel (center) stayed at the Mezam Polyclinic—an AIDS treatment center—where she became friendly with the nursing staff.

Queens: The Magazine of Queens College 25

YEAR

CHINAO

F

Every year, as part of our commitment to global education, Queens College will focus on a different

country. We’re launching this initiative in the fall with a yearlong celebration of China. Our Year

of China begins in September with fascinating art exhibits by Sin-ying Ho (QC Art Center) and Marlene

Tseng Yu (Godwin-Ternbach Museum). We then will present an exciting full day of events on Tuesday,

October 5, including a concert by the Shanghai String Quartet and Bright Sheng ’84 and a lecture by

Morris Rossabi, QC’s Distinguished Professor of History and an authority on China and Mongolia.

The celebration continues throughout the fall and spring semesters with lectures by world-renowned

scholars, dance and music performances, art exhibits, a trip to China’s legendary Silk Roads led by

Professor Rossabi, and much more. All events are open to alumni. Please visit the Year of China website

often for updates (www.qc.cuny.edu/yearof china).

Queens College


only diverse from the fact that they often speak a second language but from the experience they bring,” especially the “real-world” kind.

Through her variety of internships at QC, including ones at the U.S. Depart-ment of State and the former Salomon Smith Barney, Lao gained invaluable insights. “I knew then that I wanted to work for an investment bank,” she recalls. “These days, an internship is really a 10-week interview—it’s better from the em-ployer’s perspective and for the prospec-tive employee.”

Sums up the new trustee, “I’m a big fan of QC.” That’s easy to see: She serves on a business advi-sory committee, stays connected to Business and Liberal Arts and economics faculty, participates in Omicron Delta Epsilon (economics honor society) programs, and invites students in “to share intelligence about what to ex-pect when they work on Wall Street.” She has another Rx in mind for their careers:

QUEENS GIVING BACK

SAUL KUPFERBERG is not a QC alum. But as the son of Max Kupfer-berg ’42 and nephew of the late Kenneth Kupferberg ’41, he remains grateful to the school—and eager to continue his family’s tradition of service to it (see Q Maga-zine, Spring 2006). “I

wouldn’t be in a position to do the things I do now if my father hadn’t gotten such a great education at Queens College,” he says.

Born and raised in Queens, Saul went to Bayside High School and continued his education at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. Then he went to Dropsie College in Philadelphia for graduate studies in ancient history. In 1988 he moved back to New York and began working at Kepco, the business his family founded in Flush-ing some 40 years earlier. The company makes electrical equipment that converts AC power—supplied by utilities—to DC power.

“Everything needs a power supply,” says Kupferberg, now the !rm’s VP of

sales and marketing. “We specialize in higher-end equipment for industrial and research and development applications. It’s a big responsibility, but it also gives us a lot of pride. We have provided local employment for more than six decades.”

Outside the of!ce, Kupferberg led his father into another pursuit: racing thor-oughbreds. “They’re beautiful and amaz-ing animals,” he says. “It’s a thrill when a horse you own wins a race.”

KATHY LAO “I enrolled in Queens College expecting to register for pre-med courses and become a doctor. After tak-ing a course in economics, I realized that was an area I was much more passionate about,” says Kathy Lao ’01, VP in Corpo-rate Finance Advisory at J.P. Morgan.

With !ve daughters set on college, Lao’s parents were delighted when QC awarded her a full-tuition Presidential Scholarship. She still worked 30–40 hours a week. “That’s very consistent with other students” at QC, she says. “They need to support themselves and sometimes their families.” Their “drive and ambition,” Lao is convinced, contribute greatly to their appeal to employers. They are “not

Two exceptional alumni and a member of one of the college’s most distinguished families join the board

To learn how you can make a gift to Queens College through this program, please contact the Office of Development at 718-997-3920.

Foundation Board Welcomes Three New Trustees

Alumni and friends of Queens College have a new way to support their favor-ite school: CUNY institutions are now offering charitable gift annuities. These vehicles allow people to donate cash or stock; in return, they receive fixed life-time payments for themselves or loved ones and a federal tax deduction.

“This is a great way for someone to make a gift to the college, receive quarterly returns, and get a tax ben-efit,” says Laurie Dorf, QC’s assistant

vice president for institutional ad-vancement. “You can set up payments for yourself or someone else. The remainder goes back to the college. It’s a win-win for everyone.”

Under the CUNY Charitable Gift An-nuity Program, the minimum donation is $10,000, and donors can specify how they want their money to be used. Funds are invested in accordance with New York State Insurance Department rules.

While there is no minimum age at

which someone can fund an annuity, beneficiaries must be at least 65 years

old. An annuity can provide support for a relative or supplement your own retirement income. And, of course, it offers the priceless satisfaction of help-ing Queens College and its students.

Leaving a Legacy that Secures Your Future


“I’m hoping to create !rmer relationships so that we can foster camaraderie.”

HOWARD SIPZNER While deftly dealing with rush-hour traf!c after meetings in Manhattan, Howard Sipzner ’83 mentally travels back on the broad avenue that led from Queens College to his career in real estate !nance.

Sipzner’s family lived close to the campus. He started college a year early, but then stopped for a year and a half of travel and religious studies in Israel. When he returned to QC, he found his way into computer science. He appreciated how “the logic and programming help you

lay out things in an orderly way.”

“I owe a tremen-dous debt to Queens College because it provided me with a !rst-class education in something I loved,” Sipzner believes. That QC degree, coupled with a Harvard

MBA, “really got me off and running.” Being a “computer geek,” he adds, opened doors in his !rst job. A !nancial analyst at Merrill Lynch, he wrote a municipal bond analysis program that “really surpassed” a cumbersome system.

Beginning in 1986, Sipzner spent 12 years with Chase Manhattan Bank and its predecessors, including time as a VP at Chase Securities. In 1999 he joined Equity One, Inc., a shopping center REIT (real estate investment trust) in North Miami Beach, FL. During his time as CFO and executive VP, Equity One grew tenfold.

Since 2006 Sipzner has been executive vice president and CFO of Brandywine Realty Trust, a REIT based in Radnor, PA, that owns, develops, and manages of!ce properties. He derives satisfaction in “helping our company get through some very tough economic times.”

Sipzner appreciates the “energy, talent, and vision” of the college’s leadership team. There are other reasons why QC remains a prime property along his life’s highway. It was in college that Sipzner met his future wife, Rhonda “Reize” (Bor-gen), ’84. Sipzner—a summa cum laude graduate—demurs that “she was the better student at QC.” Zachary, the third of their four children, is now a sophomore at their alma mater.

At a jazz concert, a reunion dance, or an alumni chapter event on the West Coast, why was everyone smiling in their photos? “Nobody was there unless they wanted to be there. That was the spirit we tried to engender.” With

those words, Renée Kroll Zarin ’54

savors her own recollections of staying close to QC.

At Homecoming on October 3, the college will rename Alumni

Hall in Zarin’s honor, a tribute to “her exceptionally distinguished service.” Zarin confides she “was

absolutely taken aback” when

President James Muyskens made that announcement. As a further tribute, the college has estab-lished the Renée Kroll Zarin Fund for the QC Honors Scholarship Program. Zarin is working to interest new donors in the fund, which will be used to attract the city’s top students to QC’s chal-lenging honors programs. It is the second Zarin fund at QC; Lilo

Leeds ’48 established the earlier

one, which is awarded to an upper junior who exemplifies what an

alumnus/a should be.Zarin personifies that ideal.

Appointed by President Shirley Strum Kenny as QC’s director of Alumni Affairs (1991-1998), she

launched reunions, Alumni Day,

and the alumni magazine (found-er and first editor); set up region-al, professional, and departmental alumni chapters; and engaged graduates in numerous other ways, including the inaugural 50th

reunion for the pioneering gradu-ates of 1941.

An early childhood education major at QC, Zarin earned an MA at Teachers College of Columbia University, taught for a while, then earned an MS in urban af-fairs from Hunter College. Re-turning to Queens in 1980, she

restructured the Continuing Education paralegal program to gain American Bar Association approval, and developed a series of programs that won national awards, including Women Working

and Help for You and Your Aging

Parent, programs that were ahead of their time.

“The ‘sandwich generation’ dilemma—being a middle-aged caregiver for both children and parents—was not much discussed back then,” Zarin recalls. By

securing underwriting, she kept program fees low, and by involv-ing committees, she made others “feel part of the process.”

All that led then-President Saul Cohen to tap Zarin to direct Community Relations and later Corporate and Foundation Rela-tions, where she raised millions of dollars. Her success continued as director of Alumni Affairs and, following her retirement in 1998,

as a QC Foundation trustee. In Great Neck, NY, Zarin has

applied her civic-mindedness to parks, libraries, and local politics. She also serves as VP of her hus-band Michael’s company, Well-fleet Investments, LLC. These

days, the reunions she organizes gather together three grown children and nine grandchildren. The grandkids, she is tickled to say, think the idea of visiting the Renée Kroll Zarin Alumni Hall “is really cool.”

To contribute to Renée’s fund, send

a check payable to the QC Founda-

tion—with RKZ Fund in the memo

line—to QC Foundation, Kiely Hall

1306, 65-30 Kissena Blvd., Flushing,

NY 11367, or visit www.qc.cuny.

edu/supportqc.

Alumni Hall to Be Renamed in Honor of Renée Kroll Zarin ’54


QUEENS ALUMNI NOTES

its own lawyer, the department allowed schemer Allen Stanford to set up an unregulated of!ce where he swindled investors out of millions (perhaps billions) of dollars that were moved offshore. Lucy’s career as a feminist, civil rights activist, and hard-hitting investigative reporter was pro!led in the spring 2009 issue of Q . . . Marjorie Larney has published LGBT Youth Human Rights (LAP Lambert Publishing, 2009) about the effects of homophobia and bullying in American secondary schools. Marjorie, who majored in sociology and anthropology at Queens and also has an MA in human rights, taught with the Peace Corps in Thailand and now works with youth in Bangkok and northern California. Many may remember that Marjorie competed in the javelin at the 1952 and 1956 Olympics . . . 1966: Sam Dorn is chair and professor of endodontics at the Uni-versity of Texas Dental Branch in Houston. The UTDB is part of the Texas Medical Center, which is the largest medical center in the world . . . Penny Pearlman is the author of Pretty Smart: Lessons from Our Miss Americas (AuthorHouse, 2008) . . . 1967: Gary Lawson received the American Airlines Veterans Initiatives 2009 Commu-nity Citizenship Award. Gary is an attorney and partner in Strasburger & Price, LLP, in Dallas, TX, and also serves on the boards of nonpro!ts. The award recognizes his service to America’s Huey 091 Foundation, which helps military personnel who have been severely injured due to the 9/11 attacks, and Snowball Express, which helps the children of fallen 9/11 military heroes . . . Ferida Wolff (MSEd ’70) continues to write and publish proli!cally. Her picture book The Story Blanket (Peachtree, 2008) is a Parents’ Choice Silver Award Book and winner of the Storytelling World Resources Award (Stories for Young Listeners). Her latest book of essays is Missed Perceptions: Challenge Your Thoughts, Change Your Thinking (Pranava Books, 2009). In addition, Ferida reports that she has moved onto the web, where she is a columnist at www.seniorwomen.com and also writes her own nature blog . . . 1969: Mark Imowitz

participated in an Alumni Round-table on April 28. After receiving his accounting degree from Queens, Mark earned a master’s degree in taxation from Pace University. He is the cofounder and co-managing partner of Imowitz Koenig & Co., LLP, and is trustee and of!cer of several foundations and nonpro!ts, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged . . . 1971: Jane Breskin Zalben has two new books for 2010: Baby Shower (Roaring Brook/Macmillan), a children’s picture book that she wrote and illustrated, and Four Seasons, a middle-grade/young adult novel (Knopf/Random House). She has published more than 50 books, eight of them novels and the rest books that she wrote and illustrated. She recently participated in a group show in Maine of students of the late Marvin Bileck, former professor of studio art at Queens . . . 1972: Stephen Freeman was promot-

ed to CEO of the YAI Network, which serves people with disabilities and their families in the metropolitan region, Puerto

Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Stephen earned his master’s of social work at Hunter, where he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2008. He has been with YAI for 33 years . . . 1973: Barbara Rosenthal (MFA) continues to pursue art in her Greenwich Village studio and home, exploring existential themes in a variety of media and writing. The Lucas Carrieri Gallery in Berlin recently exhibited a selection of her prints and hosted a reading. Also in Berlin, the Directors Gallery screened a retrospective of her videos . . . Leif Rubinstein writes that, after more than 30 years in private practice as a bankruptcy attorney, he has accepted an appointment as assistant professor and director of the newly created Mortgage Foreclosure and Bankruptcy Clinic at Touro Law Center in Central Islip, NY . . . Barbara Duffy Spencer (MS ’75) maintains a full calendar as a social psychologist. She

1941: Julian Feldman passed away this past January. He was editor of the college’s !rst paper, the Crown . . . 1943: Barbara Underwood Given sends

greetings from South Setauket, NY. She writes, “I so enjoy reading about the wonderful activities and projects going on

at QC.” After college Barbara worked for Time, then went overseas with the Red Cross. She earned a PhD in social work from Tulane, and married in 1979. She moved back to the metropolitan area after her husband died in order to be near her brother. Now living in a life-care facility, she is part of a group that meets to read poems, plays, and novels out loud, and she says about it: “The New York Times stated that it was a lost art! We seniors are indulging” . . . 1953: Alan Saks retired from the bench last year after 28 years as a judge, the past 14 of them on the New York State Supreme Court. He is continuing part time as a judicial hearing of!cer . . . 1954: Vivian Listain-Carlin recently organized Friends of Seniors, a volunteer group in her home in Newburgh, NY, which has the largest senior population in Orange County; it aims to provide needed services to people so that they can stay in their homes. Along with a friend, Vivian secured public and nonpro!t backing for the group, and they have already trained and certi!ed over 20 volunteers. Vivian has been a marriage and family counselor in private practice for 30 years, having taught both college and elementary school before that. She writes that “I have very fond memories of Queens College.” She also has two children, six grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren . . . 1955: Joseph Muzio has written his !rst book, Buddy Remembers: Then and Now (Trafford, 2008), a memoir of Italian American life in Brooklyn and Queens. Joe graduated with degrees in both biology and political science, then joined the Marine Corps, where he was made captain before leaving the service. He

received his master’s and doctoral degrees at Columbia University’s Teachers College. For 33 years he taught at Kingsborough Community College in the department of biological sciences, where he was chair for 16 years. He was also the director of the marine technology program for seven years until he retired in 2002. He and his wife, Lois Grant Muzio, now live in the beautiful coastal village of Rockport, MA, but Joe remains interested in Queens College. On March 22 he came back to give a talk to students . . . 1957: Marvin Miller teaches history at Suffolk County Community College, where he is especially interested in the subject of “historical omissions” from textbooks—“with all due respect to my former QC history professors like Hallberg and Hall and others who were great.” Marvin is the author of Wunderlich’s Salute (Malamud-Rose, 1983), the only book on the American Nazis’ Camp Siegfried on Long Island in the 1930s, and Terminating “the Socially Inadequate” (Malamud-Rose, 1996), about relationships between the Nazi and American eugenics movements . . . 1963: F.

Gerard Errante writes that, after 30 years as a professor of music at Norfolk State University in Virginia, he has retired from

academia and relocated to Las Vegas, but continues to record, perform, and tour. His newest CD, Delicate Balance, contains works for clarinet and electronics that were composed for him . . . 1964: David Goldbeck and his wife and coauthor, Nikki, have been voices of the whole foods movement for some 35 years. Their popular Healthy Highways, a guide to eating well on the road, was released in a second edition last year (Ceres, 2009). They continue to write, making their home in Woodstock, NY . . . Lucy Komisar won the prestigious National Headliner Award and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for her exposé of the Florida Banking Department’s role in facilitating a Ponzi scheme. Against the advice of


speaks, trains, consults, and coaches individuals and groups on overcom-ing inner obstacles to success . . . 1975: Annie Lubliner Lehmann published her !rst book, The Accidental Teacher: Life Lessons from My Silent Son (Univer-sity of Michigan Press, 2009). It describes life with her severely autistic son Jonah, who is now grown and living in a supervised home. The book has received rave reviews and was a Mom’s Choice

Award 2009 Silver Recipient (Special and Exceptional Needs). Annie, a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines, lives in Michigan with her husband and two younger children. She is donating all proceeds from the book to autism research . . . Les Reker (MFA) has been appointed executive director of the Ellen Noël Art Museum of the Permian Basin, located in Odessa, TX. Les has had an active career in the arts: exhibiting his own work

nationally and internationally, teaching, and working in museum management. He is now far from the urban canyons of New York: the Ellen Noël Art Museum was created through grass-roots efforts to serve a region of over 100,000 square Texas miles . . . 1976: Loren Coen is living in Fort Myers, FL, and working as director of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation Marine Laboratory. Loren writes that he has had a

rewarding career in conservation. He received his MS from Florida State University and his PhD from the University of

Maryland; he worked with the Smithsonian in Belize; he held graduate appointments in Alabama, South Carolina, and Florida; and he has directed a diverse array of research programs and undergradu-

Not only does Joe Brostek ’55 control the heavens, it seems he also holds dominion over the Earth.

The string of rainless commencements he supervised as executive director of events from 1988 to 2008 is Queens College legend, but many may be less familiar with the story of Lake Misiurski.

Re"ecting on his 60-year association with QC as a student, alumni board member, and employee, Brostek, who retired in January, recalled his role in dealing with the large body of water that for 20 years had plagued pedestrians and drivers on Reeves Avenue. In 1994 when he asked QC’s Buildings & Grounds Dept. about the enormous puddle, they laughingly said, “That’s our

lakefront property,” explaining they’d named it for former B&G head Julian Misiurski.

Money to address the inadequate drainage was regularly proposed in the city’s annual budget but never made the !nal cut. So Brostek and Jeff Gottlieb ’64, who worked in City Councilmember Morton Povman’s of!ce, initiated a lobbying effort with local of!cials. On October 24, 1995, a groundbreaking ceremony was held for a new drainage system. Lake Misiurski vanished from the face of the Earth.

That doggedness characterized Brostek’s time at the college, going back to 1950, his freshman year. Even then he was a campus booster, whether serving as student body president or helping to lead a fundraising effort for the March of Dimes. “I was part of what was affectionately called ‘the lunatic fringe,’ the two or

three percent of students who were responsible for most campus activities,” he said.

As much as Brostek has helped de!ne QC in that time, he has, in turn, been de!ned by the college. “I met my wife, Carol Heiser (’54), here,” he said, “and my best friend at the college was best man at my wedding. Many classmates remain our friends to this day.”

While a student, Brostek was wing commander of the college’s Air Force ROTC unit, graduating as a lieutenant and doing a tour of duty with the Strategic Air Command in Kansas. He then embarked on a career in marketing with several blue chip !rms, running events in the U.S. and abroad. Representing GE’s satellite manufacturing division, he witnessed space launches at Cape Canaveral.

Those experiences would later serve him well in his role marshalling the disparate elements essential to QC’s annual launch event, commencement. “In 1986 President Shirley Kenny asked me to come to the college as a consultant; two years later she offered me the job of director of special events and I assumed responsibility for commencement.”

Brostek also served as director of alumni affairs from 2001 to 2006. At commencement 2005, he joined fellow members of the class of 1955 in celebrating the 50th anniversary of their graduation. That day borough president Helen Marshall ’73 issued a proclamation from the podium declaring it “Joe Brostek Day” in the borough of Queens in recognition of his service to the college and the community—which she did again on the occasion of his of!cial retirement party, March 9.

His alma mater also recognized Brostek’s service with the creation of the Joe and Carol Brostek Prize, a fund that will provide !nancial assistance to exceptional students who are active in leadership roles on campus.

Even in retirement, Brostek continues to serve QC. A living repository of six decades of campus history, he is helping Rosenthal Library create an archive of a vast collection of materials he has donated, including programs, posters, hundreds of photos, DVDs, CDs, banners, etc. He has also donated his popular Flags of the World collection (some 300), which the library has exhibited on two previous occasions, and consults with the library on events and exhibits.

Not Quite into the Sunset for QC’s Events Maestro Joe Brostek

Carol and Joe Brostek

To make a contribution, send a check payable to the QC Foundation—with Brostek Prize in the memo line—to QC Foundation, Kiely Hall 1306, 65-30 Kissena Blvd., Flushing, NY 11367 or visit www.qc.cuny.edu/supportqc


ate and graduate students. His lab is located on Sanibel Island, reached by what he describes as “an amazing and beautiful drive to work” across a causeway of about 10 miles that passes over “seagrass-laden estuarine bottoms of turquoise water” . . . 1977: Dan Demeter spoke at an Alumni Roundtable on March 10. Dan is chief information of!cer and senior vice president of Korn/Ferry International, the world’s largest executive recruiting !rm. He is a specialist in information systems, and in 2005 was named a Premier 100 IT Leader by Computerworld. After getting his BA in economics from Queens, he earned a master’s in business administration in management and international business from New York University and served as an of!cer in the Israeli Defense Force . . . Rima Sokoloff was honored with a 40 Year Service Award by Molloy College in Rockville Centre, NY, where she has been teaching varied subjects in dance and, for many years, directing the Molloy Modern Dance Theatre Collection. Rima writes, “It was a great celebration. To my delight, I am still teaching some of those subjects and enjoy working with enthusiastic students.” Rima also was president of the American Dance Guild, which honored her at

its 50th anniversary in 2007, and was president of the Queens Council on the Arts. She lives in Kew Garden Hills with her husband . . . 1978: Susan Forgasch Lopatkin

was reelected to her second term as mayor of the Village of Kensington, located in Great Neck, NY, where she won a

contested election with a landslide victory of almost 80 percent of the vote. Susan, who has a BA in accounting, heads her own !nancial planning and consulting !rm, Comprehensive Financial Strategies, established in 1991 . . . Robert MacGuf!e found himself at the center of the national health care debate. A memo he posted on the website of his political action committee, Right Principles, encouraged citizens to debate legislators at town hall forums across the country. Robert is a Libertarian who is proud never to have voted for a Republican or Democrat in a national election . . . 1979: Darryl Holmes has been made vice president of commercial lines underwriting for the Selective Insurance Group . . . 1981: Douglas Gladstone is


Accomplishments and awards have marked the careers of a pair of brothers-in-law with strong links to Queens College.

In March, on the occasion of his retirement from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas, David Katzman ’63 was hailed for his 41 years of service as a professor of American studies, including a decade of

chairing the highly ranked department. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, he was repeatedly honored by UK for outstanding research, teaching, and mentorship skills.

“My career was interdisciplinary from the start,” says Katzman. “I worked in black history and women’s studies—I was interested in the idea that there were multiple narratives. I was very much shaped by the QC curriculum, which integrated foreign language and other civilizations.” In his retirement he will continue to advise several PhD students, sit on committees, and—through

December—serve on the journal American Studies, where he has been the top editor since 1989.

Meanwhile, Katzman’s brother-in-law, James Meyer, has been enjoying his time in the limelight. A partner with Greco Planning Inc., a Long Island !rm that advises clients on estate and retirement issues, Meyer received the Gilbert Tilles Award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals Long Island Chapter in 2009; the honor, issued annually, recognizes a volunteer who leads fundraising projects for one or more not-for-pro!t organizations. He will pick up another distinction this fall, when SUNY Brockport will name him an alumnus of the year.

As a faculty member at QC, Meyer coached soccer and hockey and advised physical education majors. Sidelined by injury in the 1970s, he got involved in alumni recreation and became director of alumni relations and development before leaving QC in 1983. “If I hadn’t broken my leg, I wouldn’t be in this !eld,” he says. “One of the things I am most grateful for is that the alumni program gave me a chance.” Another thing he is grateful for: his introduction on campus to the woman who would become his wife, Roberta Brooks ’68. Her sister Sharyn ’76 is married to Katzman.

Connected by Queens College and Marriage

the author of A Bitter Cup of Coffee: How MLB and the Players Association Threw 874 Retirees a Curve (Word Association Publishers, 2010), which is about former major leaguers who are not receiving their pensions. Doug lives with his wife and their two-year-old daughter in the Capitol Region of New York . . . Howard Levitt returned to campus to give the keynote address to the Queens College Business Forum on March 18, where he discussed his experiences as former CEO of Tourneau. Howard, who has a BA in accounting and economics, went on to revive Tourneau, the New York–based luxury watchmaker and retailer, transforming it from a nearly bankrupt !rm into a global leader. He was named New York’s Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young in 2006 . . . Yvonne Vega is living in Florida, where she is a volunteer librarian for the Deer!eld Beach Library and active in the Deer!eld Democratic Club. She is an avid swimmer and retains the foreign-language interests she developed at Queens, where she studied German, French, and Italian . . . 1987: Linore Rose Burkard has published her third Regency novel, The Country House Courtship (Harvest House, 2010) . . . 1989: Harriet Hamlin (MSEd)

is teaching science at Takoma Park (MD) Middle School. One of her favorite projects is a MESA/Sea Perch camp, where she teaches middle schoolers to build an underwater robot from a kit supplied by the Of!ce of Naval Research; her group won !rst place in the 2008–2009 Sea Perch competition. This project helps mentor young people and encourage them to develop concepts and skills in math, science, and engineering. Harriet, a member of the Kappa Gamma chapter of Kappa Delta Pi, has been recognized as an outstanding teacher by her peers and, in 2007, by US Black Engineer & Information Technology . . . 1990: Nancy Jacobs (MA) received her doctor of audiology degree in March from the Arizona School of Health Sciences at A. T. Still University in Mesa, AZ. She plans to continue as an audiologist with the New York City Department of Education. Nancy and her husband live in Spring Valley, NY . . . Jennifer Yormak Jones (MSE) is co-owner and executive director of the StarStruck Performing Arts Center in Hobe Sound, FL . . . Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa has retired from her librarianship and teaching position with the New York City Department of Education, and is concentrating on her writing. Her

James Meyer


!rst novel, Daughters of the Stone (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), was published to glowing reviews; it explores Afro-Puerto Rican women’s experience on the island and in the contemporary United States. Dahlma, who has received numerous awards, is living in the Bronx . . . 1995: Edward Gollin (MA) is teaching music at Williams College in Williamstown, MA, and writing a book on Béla Bartók . . . 1996: Ari Hoffnung has moved from Bear Stearns to the public sector, accepting a position on City Comptroller John Liu’s staff as executive director of the budget and accounting areas. Ari reports directly to Deputy Comptroller Simcha Felder . . . 1997: Alan van Capelle joined City Comptroller John Liu’s staff in March. As the longest-serving executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, Alan had been an outspoken gay advocate for same-sex marriage in New York State. He is Liu’s deputy comptroller for external affairs, serving as chief advisor on intergovernmental relations, politics, and communica-tions . . . 1998: Rekha Malhotra, also known as DJ Rekha, was inducted into the People’s Hall of Fame by City Lore. She was recognized for her many cultural contributions as a producer, curator, educator, and activist in New York City—the “ambassador of Bhangra,” according to the New York Times, and one of the country’s most in"uential South Asians according to Newsweek. Rekha was pro!led in the Fall 2006 issue of Q . . . 2000: Yoseph Goldstein was named Brooklyn Supreme Court Employee of the Year in 2010. He has worked in the Foreclosure Department since 2003 . . . 2001: Zack Danziger (MA) is teaching and performing in Massachusetts, where he plays guitar and some-times bass with local bands. He is also recording an album of original music, tentatively titled Sun Is All We Need . . . Lorena Lockey has been appointed director of human resources at Henry Schein, Inc. She will be based in Melville, NY, but also will assume responsibility for the company’s facility in Puerto Rico. Lorena lives in Bayside, NY . . .

2003: Sharon Johnson has published a collection of poetry titled Emotions (Xlibris). After getting her

BA in English at Queens, she earned a master’s in business administration and human resource management from the University of Phoenix, and is currently a doctoral candidate there. Sharon writes that she lives in Pembroke Pines, FL, with her “three beautiful children Derrick, Gabriel, and Adonai” . . . Melanie Tomaszewski has thrown herself into fund-raising for Haitian earthquake relief. A resident of Madison, NJ, she helped to recruit some 55 local sponsors for Hearts for Haiti, raising $4,000 to print 5,000 sets of 20 notecards designed by local professional artists. Melanie, a graphic artist, owns the Tivoli Creative Design Studio along with her husband. They have a toddler named Maya . . . 2005: Nicholas Linnehan continues his active theatre career as a director, actor, and writer. He has been working as a director of children’s shows and has taught drama classes for children for the past 13 years while continuing to act and write. His !rst play, The Real Story, was produced in 2001 by the Post Theatre Company, and his second, award-winning play, Identity, was produced twice by Queens College. His latest play, Erosion: Life on Life’s Terms, premiered in January at Nicu’s Spoon Theater. send us your news We want to hear from you.

Tell us where you are, what you are doing, what you remember most about your college years, and enclose a photo. Email: [email protected]: Alumni News, Of!ce of Alumni Affairs, Queens College, 65-30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, NY 11367. Phone: 718-997-3930

MISSING ALUMNINot on our mailing list? Add or update your address at www.qc.cuny.edu/QCF.

32 QUEENS: The Magazine of Queens College32 QUEENS: The Maga-zine of Queens College

65-30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, NY 11367-1597

NON-PROFIT ORG.U.S. POSTAGE

PAIDFLUSHING, NYPERMIT NO. 48

Congratulations, Class of 2010!The college's 86th Commencement on May 27 was a great day for graduates and their families. The beautiful wrought-iron gate on Kissena Boulevard, through which all incoming students initially enter the campus, for the first time saw members of a graduating class—all 2,200 of them—pass through on their way to the ceremony on the Quad. The principal Commencement speaker was Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian physi-cian and Nobel Peace Prize nominee who is committed to reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. The college bestowed an honorary doctorate upon Amitav Ghosh, the world-renowned Indian novelist and former QC distinguished professor of comparative literature.

Documents

THE MAGAZINE OF QUEENS COLLEGEqc.cuny.edu/communications/qmag/documents/qmag_fall_10.pdfcollege magazine and have been very impressed with the variety of programs and opportunities